This is a familiar religious concept of a duality in the two aspects of the soul,
the angelic and the devilish-aspects described by Shakespeare about these friends in
Sonnet 144. The concept exists in Judaism as the "good" and the "evil inclinations"
but is not exclusive to the Jewish religion.

Or any religion. It is very prominent, for example, in Plato (Phaedrus, in
particular) and Freud, who took Plato's notion of a charioteer driving a good and
bad horse and called them Das Ich, Es und Uberich.

>With regard to Sonnet 20 Abigail Quart and I are playing tennis on the same
>side of the net. Unstressed endings are statistically rarer than stressed
>endings. So if you have a sonnet in which all the endings are unstressed,
>something is going on. It's clearly an outlier that calls for explanation.

But it's a different matter with the other cases that were raised. What rate of
unstressed endings over a given stretch of lines is likely to register as beyond the
threshold value of random noise? 100% over more than ten lines? Absolutely. 100%
over four lines? Probably not.

But a sonnet is rhymed. You're not looking at fourteen lines, but at seven rhymes.